by neetha Napew
‘And you promised he’d not see that Jinian anymore. Just me. Just me and Bryan.’ Her voice was a little petulant, more than a little confused.
‘I’m sure he’ll not see Jinian ever again.’ My heart almost stopped as the sense of the words came through. This was the Witch Huldra telling the absolute, literal truth. What had Jinian called the technique? Truth spelling! Twisting what the listener wanted to hear so that one could promise in words without promising in fact. Truth spelling. That was what had occupied Sylbie’s time on the road, why she had been so late in arriving at the Bright Demesne. She had been truth spelled into betraying me!
Now a new voice, Dedrina, the Basilisk. ‘In return for our services in this matter, we asked you to find out where certain people are. You recall?’
‘Of course. I asked Peter and he told me. Mertyn is in schooltown. No one knows where Mavin is. She went off somewhere, and no one knows how to find her.’
Dedrina made a spitting noise.
‘It’s true,’ said Sylbie. ‘Evidently she’s always done that. Sometimes she goes away for years. Who else? Oh, yes. Jinian is up north near the Maze. Peter doesn’t know exactly where she is now. That’s true, too. I listened outside the door when Peter was telling Himaggery all about it, and he really doesn’t know.’
‘How did she escape from Storm Grower?’ asked the Witch.
‘Storm Grower? Oh, the giants. I don’t know. Perhaps Peter told them when he was here last, but he hasn’t spoken of it this time. At least not when I’ve been able to hear. Perhaps she and Peter have had a falling-out.’ Sylbie seemed very satisfied at this thought.
‘I would think you might have more gratitude to one who saved you from the hunt in Fangel,’ said the Witch. ‘You do not seem to care much for Jinian.’
‘It wasn’t her who saved me, it was Bryan,’ Sylbie answered. ‘Bryan gorbled the Ogress when she tried to bite him.’
Jinian had told me of that hunt. I thought Sylbie’s account of it was rather oversimplified. Though it was true that Bryan had dispatched the Ogress, the Ogress had been only one of a considerable hunting party. If it had not been for Jinian, both Sylbie and Bryan would likely have perished along with an assortment of other prey. I sweated, snarling internal reproaches at myself. There was a new voice, a chill voice with an icy sibilance in it.
‘You were supposed to plant the amethyst crystals in the wine stores. I suppose you did that?’ Dedrina’s voice.
‘No. I’ll do that when I go back. I-‘
‘When you go back! What makes you think they will let you in, stupid girl?’
‘They’ll let me in,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I’ll have to be there or Bryan will have a fit. . . .’
‘Where’s the girl Jinian?’ Dedrina asked.
‘No one knows where Jinian is,’ said Sylbie. ‘And I for one don’t care.’
‘Shut your mouth, girl. You’ve done your part and are finished. Comes our part now, to use that young buck Shifter in there as bait for the girl. Then Huldra gets him and I get her.’
‘No!’ Sylbie, very sharp, frightened. ‘I get Peter. That’s what Huldra promised me.’
‘Stupid chit. She promised you he would never Shift again, never see Jinian again. Quite true. He will neither Shift nor see when he is dead.’ The Basilisk laughed.
Silence, a wail, a tantrum wail. Though I was nowhere near I could visualize it. Sylbie throwing herself at the Basilisk, nails scratching. So a kitten might launch at a gnarlibar, hissing and scratching, and like a kitten she was thrown across the enclosure to land against the main tent pole. The canvas shivered. There was a crack, as though something had broken, and then a breathless sobbing. The voices grew nearer. Eyelids half-shut over eyeballs rolled well back, shallowly breathing, I let them come. They looked at me, kicked my presumably unconscious body, and went away again.
Sounds outside. Shouts, the crack of a whip, a quick tuppa, tuppa, tuppa on a drum calling some work party or other. Someone came in and got me, packing me in a wagon like so much luggage, me never quivering. Lords, but I wanted to open my eyes and look. Where was Sylbie? Where was Bryan? Evidently I had not really heard Bryan, there under the wall. That had been all mockery done by Huldra and her cronies. I tried for the Shifting - nothing. Tried again, tried - nothing. Still again. Gave up trying with my whole self wet with sweat and stinking from the effort. Lay quietly, quietly, trying to think while wheels creaked and the entourage began to move away. Then I risked half opening my eyes. I could peer out the back of the wagon to see a great part of the camp trailed out behind it in the predawn gray, all making a great dust with feet and wheels as we came away north on the Great Road. At least half the besiegers were in the train. So much the easier for Himaggery and Barish. So much the worse for me.
So, we were going away. What was it Jinian had told me? Huldra and her companions had been instructed to distribute amethyst crystals in the southlands and then to go to the Ice Caverns and destroy all there.
Which was undoubtedly where we were going. They were going. Moving on to the second part of the duty, leaving the first undone. I thanked all the old gods that Sylbie had been so eager to betray me she had delayed betrayal of the Demesne. Those at the Bright Demesne were safe, at least. For a time.
As for me, I was being taken away like a sack of roots, like a stack of wood, like nothing living or thinking, like bait for a trap. If I could have wept, I would have done so. Beside me a lumpy sack was breathing in a harsh, irregular way, gasps with too long silences between. I tried to say ‘Sylbie?’ but my voice wouldn’t work. Still, I knew it was Sylbie. The breathing was that of someone badly injured, and I thought of Bryan, wondering where he was. Likely sleeping peacefully back in the little gatehouse. It had all been a trick and a deceit.
The reeking smoke of the spell casting had made my head hurt quite badly. I gave up pretending to be unconscious and actually became so for a protracted time.
When I came to myself again, it was in the tent once more. The train had stopped along the road to make camp. From where I lay on a pile of packs and rolled rugs, I could see past the tent flap to an open space with a cookfire and another tent. Shadows lay close and tight at its base. Noontime. The smell of the food made my stomach clench, and I realized I could move, though only a little. My hands and feet were still tied and no amount of Shifting did me any good. It was as though I had never been able to do it, as though I had only dreamed the Talent and it had never actually existed.
The ropes that tied me were deadly black, wound with a thread of silver fire that glittered and flowed like water along the cords. I thought of Shifting my feet and the silver flame blazed toward my feet. I thought of Shifting hip joints and the fire spun upward, surrounding my loins in a steely embrace. So. Fire was one of the attributes of Witches, along with Power Holding and
Beguilement, though I had seen no Beguilement from Huldra. Her Talent had set this fire upon me, and her Talent held it there. I preferred it to be a matter of Talent rather than of enchantment. If she had enchanted it, many lives would have been spent on it. Jinian had spoken of Huldra’s willingness to spend lives upon Sendings and enchantments.
I was thinking so deeply of this when I raised my head to look out through the tent flaps once more that the sight there seemed only a continuation of the thought. They had Sylbie trussed up like a zeller for the butcher, lying close beside the cookfire. Her eyes were open, rolled back into her head, the whites staring at me blindly. There was blood on her forehead, probably where she had hit the tent pole. A lock of hair lay across her face, and it moved slightly with her breath. She was alive, then, though barely. I wanted to cry out, ‘Get a Healer for her!’ but I could not speak.
Oh, Sylbie, Sylbie, foolish, silly girl. First rule of the Game, Sylbie. Put not yourself into another’s hands. First rule. And you put yourself in Huldra’s hands completely, holding nothing back, no motivation, no emotion, nothing you could use to fight with. And you put me in Huldra’s hands as wel
l, making me impotent to help you. Because you didn’t like my being Shifter. You destroyed us both, Sylbie, because you did not like my being Shifter.
The waves of smoky black still came over me from time to time. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, the hair across her face lay quiet and there was blood on her chest, soaking her shirt. Beside the fire Huldra chuckled as she dropped something into her cauldron.
‘Rise Gambelor. Rise Gundegor. Rise Gurnasham!’ She shrieked at the cauldron, stirring it, steam coming out of it in a great rush as though it had been one of the hot springs. ‘Rise Boldam, Burwar, Bass!’ The steam coalesced, began to roil and eddy, making faces and forms in an endless succession, mouths that opened and shut, teeth that gaped, eyes that stared through shadow holes at the Witch, Huldra. On the other side of the fire, Dedrina sat, smiling, watching.
‘Rise Sorfut, Sarbat, Shandypas!’ screamed the witch. ‘Bring her whose heart I fed you to do my will!’
The horrror of it clutched me. When Dorn the Necromancer had been my companion, I had seen Mandor, many days dead, rise up from his grave to answer my questions, and I had seen the ghosts of Bannerwell march to war. But I had not seen the newly dead called forth before, still grieving over life, rising from the cauldron in which her heart’s blood boiled. Oh, Sylbie, Sylbie.
She was there, weeping, shadow hands reaching out. I saw her mouth moving and could read the words on her lips. ‘Bryan! Bryan!’ Calling for the baby she had left, her child and mine. Silently calling, ‘Bryan!’
Helpless, hopeless, I swore vengeance against Huldra. ‘Mavin,’ I pled, ‘if I am dead, venge me against this Witch. Himaggery, if I am gone and the world goes soon after, still requite me against this hag.’ All this horror and pain while still unable to move more than a muscle, tied tight by enchanted bonds and knowing nothing of what the Witch intended.
That was soon obvious. She beckoned the ghost, waving her hands in an endless dance, ringers making quick signs of fire, like letters in the air. Almost I thought I could read those signs. The ghost seemed able, also, for it wept and pled.
‘What are you doing?’ growled the Basilisk.
‘Telling this unwilling Sending what it must do,’ replied the Witch. ‘I tell it the child is forfeit if its mother does not do my bidding. It knows the man is forfeit if she does. So. It hangs there, quivering, in agony. Aha. Amusing, is it not, great lizard? So caught in their little feelings of goodness and badness, of love against love. Foolish, to care so much for any creature. . . .
‘Still, I remember the love of a child. I had a son once. Mandor, his name was, as beautiful as the sun itself. That one inside there, that Peter, killed him - or as good as, though Mandor took his own life in the end. My son declared Game against King Mertyn of School-town, using Peter as Talisman in the play. Perhaps he knew Mertyn was thalan to the boy, perhaps not. It no longer matters what he knew or did not know. There was a hidden Sorcerer in play, and Mandor was burned with sorcerer’s fire. Even I could not bear to look at my son after that. He was hideous who had been so beautiful. Well, my vengeance has been slow in coming, but it will be all the better for that. Watch now. The Sending is ready to depart.’
The Witch stood taller, reaching toward the sky as though to summon something hideous from beyond the clouds. ‘Find Jinian,’ she cried. ‘Tell her I hold Peter the Shifter in my care. Soon he will begin to die if she does not come to me, and his dying will be long. If she will come to the caverns where the hundred thousand lie, if she will come there and submit to me, I will release him from his bondage.’
Ah, so and so she would release me. At the point of a knife, perhaps, or in the new heart of a fire, or only to bind me again in some new and more stringent chains. I begged silently that Jinian would not listen to this Sending, this screaming ghost that fled upward now into the sky, a streak of bloody gray, leaving the two hags behind to stare after it.
‘I thank you for your cooperation,’ Basilisk was saying. ‘So we will be alike in vengeance. For your son, Mandor. For my daughter, Dedrina-Lucir. What avengement is in your mind?’
‘I had thought to freeze him yet alive in the ice of the caverns where we go. It can be done with an ensorcell-ment to leave him alive and thinking for every moment of a thousand years. We will leave him so and seal the caverns behind him. Let him lie there and think of Mandor, and of Huld, my brother-husband, whom he also killed. Let him think of them until he dies at last, after a millennium, in the lonely cold.’
‘This seems good to me.’ The Basilisk stretched, talons forming at the ends of her fingers, scrabbling at the ground on which she sat to leave long furrows there. ‘As with him, so with Jinian also. Let them both lie a thousand years in the ice before they die,’ and she began to laugh, choking herself with her mirth. ‘Except that I will scratch her first, only a little.’
In a moment the Witch summoned someone to drag Sylbie’s body away.
The day wore on. I heard the cries of carrion birds and knew they feasted upon Sylbie’s flesh. A servant came in to press bites of food into my mouth, food that I chewed and swallowed stubbornly, keeping my strength for the moment in which it might do me some good. Huldra did not come to gloat over my captivity, unusual for her family. Both Mandor and Huld had been gloaters.
Late in the evening we began to move once more, leaving the road to wend our way north and west across the fertile valley toward the mountain wall to the west. If we kept on in this same direction we would come to Bannerwell, and from Bannerwell we could drop westward to the River Haws. North along that river would bring us to Cagihiggy Creek, and upward along that creek would bring us eventually to the ruins of the Blot and the Ice Caverns. How many days? Ten or twelve at the least. With wagons, probably longer than that. And Jinian, alone there in the north, travelling to that place. For she would, I knew she would. Though she feared Huldra and Dedrina Dreadeye, still she would come for me.
And for the first time in years, I gave way to slow, impotent tears, unable to hold them back.
It was then Huldra came to punish me for the fact that Mandor had died.
Nine
Jinian’s Story: The Seven
I greeted the six with a good deal of grabbing and squeezing and exclamations of joy. Cat shook me, wagging her head from side to side. ‘You’re all bones, girl! What’ve you been up to?’ Then hugged me when I tried to tell her.
We went no farther than a few hundred paces to a grassy hollow among a dozen great trees, there to build a fire for the making of tea while the words poured out of me like wine from a cask, bubbling and frothing and spilling somewhat as I tried to make sense of it all. Ganver and the Great Maze and everything that had gone before.
‘And I have failed,’ I cried. ‘Ganver tried to teach me the meaning of star-eye, but I have not learned it.’
Five of them drew in their breath, in awe, their eyes wide. Dodie did not know enough to do it, but she watched them with her mouth open. ‘What does that mean?’ she whispered to them, to me.
‘To have been taught by an Eesty!’ Murzy marveled. ‘Why, if you could learn it,’ she said, ‘you could do the final couplet. It is said no Wize-ard has done so since the time of Tindel the Marvelous.’
‘The final couplet?’ Dodie asked.
‘Eye of the Star, Where Old Gods Are,’ I told her. ‘To summon up the old gods, one and all. I have used Eye of the Star to fasten the Dervishes down while I spoke to them. They did not like it much. I wonder if the old gods would like it at all, being summoned up.’
‘That spell would be worth having, considering what we are facing,’ said Cat. ‘Can you tell us of the lessons? Or did you take an oath of secrecy?’
‘No oath, no nothing,’ I told her. ‘And I’ll tell you everything. Perhaps you can make more sense of it than I. But let me tell you as we go. We must move ourselves. We must go to the Old South Road City and build it up again.’
They looked at one another, like so many owls. ‘Build it up again?’
asked Sarah Shadowsox at last. ‘That seems rather a large job for one seven, Jinian.’
‘Of course,’ I cried. ‘Of course it’s too large for us alone. There must be more. Other sevens beside us. And Dervishes. The Immutables, all the Great Games-men from the Ice Caverns. The hundred thousand.’
‘There should be,’ murmured Murzy, shaking her head. ‘Indeed there should be, Jinian. The question is, can there be? Can there be any at all?’
‘I don’t understand,’ I faltered, afraid that I understood all too well.
‘Shadow,’ said Bets. ‘Murzemire Hornloss, Seer that she is, has done a bit of peering and prying. She Sees shadow and more shadow. Everywhere. The Bright Demesne under siege by shadow. Great drifts of it cutting the road south of Lake Yost. Xammer cut off. Schooltown cut off. Betand surrounded - at some distance, true, and there is still travel in and out - but Pfarb Durim is completely isolated. Most of the cities and Demesnes had some warning; most of them brought in stores and prepared for siege; but still, travel is becoming very difficult, Jinian. The question is whether anyone can get to the Old South Road City at all.’
‘Gamelords,’ I whispered. ‘Ganver said the Oracle had learned to control the shadow, but I had not thought of this. Are you sure that what you saw is now?’
They shook their heads. No, they weren’t sure it had happened yet, but it would be soon if not now.
‘No matter,’ I said. ‘We must get there. There is no other way. Somehow we must reach Old South Road City; we and all the others needed there. Tragamors to rebuild the city and the towers. Sorcerers to Hold Power for them. Elators to carry messages. Armigers to Fly aloft and see where ancient walls and roadways ran. Perhaps even Necromancers to Rise up the ghosts of that place to learn how the Bell was cast in the first place.’
‘We have spread the word as widely as we could, Jinian. And the Dervishes tell us they have carried word to the seven as well as the other Wize-ards everywhere. If we can get to Old South Road City, there will be others come to help - such as can.’
